I think this was posted before but only in the free for all thread, i think it might be worthy of its own thread because its kinda cool to see what the internet metal community was like back in the early 90s

to get really far back to the early 90s you'll have to change the page number in the URL like this [url]http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rock-n-roll.metal.metallica/topics?hl=en&start=37000&sa=N[/url]

change the bolded part and it'll take you to that page

Heres a page from when Metallica had just released "Load", i think its awesome we can see peoples reactions from when that album was released

USENET was the place it all started. I posted on some of those forums back in the tail end of the 1990s for metal, and actually continue to post on a couple select groups into the present - like 15 years after I started on the net. AOL Unholy Metal and later Music Metal chatrooms were a big meeting place, as was Yahoo chat, and IRC channels. When forum software began to show up in the early 2000s, Relapse had probably the most visited message board. ANUS had traffic but was lame as hell (the only threads worth a damn in its history featured Seth Putnam trolling or Prozak trolling his own), Braveboards came about and were pretty cool, and then like a billion other forums opened up and killed USENET.

_________________"It's not some safe thing like Fugazi where everyone sits down and eats their tofu and goes 'wow man, that's revolutionary' " - Jerry A of Poison Idea

> I'm a longtime Metallica fan, but I've only been on the internet for >about 2 years now. So I was wondering, was there this much bad sentiment for >TBA?

Yep. Mostly from people who jumped on the Metallica bandwagon with Justice. Some people just want the same thing ablum after album, and they're not going to get that from a band as progressive as Metallica is (and always has been). The bad sentiment will die down after a while.

Seth Putnam trolling ANUS was incredible. The threads lasted a couple months before being deleted in one of many purges, but my god, it was beautiful. Lots of people caught feelings as he lambasted them as being poseurs, pussies, and fakes. The best part is when he so destroyed some kid that claimed to be nihilistic and anti-societal that everyone in the forum had to be like "Well, I guess Seth's right."

_________________"It's not some safe thing like Fugazi where everyone sits down and eats their tofu and goes 'wow man, that's revolutionary' " - Jerry A of Poison Idea

Folkemon_, thank you! I love old gems like this, articles and old internet postings. I'm not going to lie though, I had no idea they had forums back in 1996. I was really young. Was it a mainstream thing back then or was it underground?

Oh, just wanted to point this out

some guy back in 1996 wrote:

I suppose the first album was thrash was it ? Just because two trackswent a bit fast doesn't make it thrash. Same with all the other albums, acouple of tracks on each one and they are labelled as thrash - grow up.Metallica have only ever been a bloody good HARD ROCK BAND - copyingtheir British influences - but doing it a million times better.

some guy back in 1996 wrote:

Just remember who Metallica's influences are -basically all the British rock bands such as Budgie, Diamond Head,Motorhead and Sabbath.

Uh, rock bands?

that guy, about Load wrote:

If you put this album on and REALLY LISTEN with grown up ears, you canhear all the influences in there just like you could with the 1st albumand subsequent albums.

My first metal forum was the old Cannibal Corpse board at Audiogalaxy. After AG died people stuck around but gradually the population disappeared. I wonder if theres anyone here that used to post there..

I also started out on Yahoo in the metal chat rooms circa 1996-97. It's funny looking back now, thinking about how I used to swap shitty Real Audio files using ICQ. I remember how happy I was when some guy sent me 32 kbps samples of Emperor's "Anthems..." and whatever Abigor CD came out at the time. Of course I was already doing the tape trading thing at that point, but it was nice to be able to hear the stuff right away and for free. After I became a regular in chat, one of the guys invited me to a Yahoo club called "Black Metal" which seems to still be around to this day. Unfortunately I don't have access to it anymore because the accounts I was using at the time were both terminated for various TOS violations, and currently the club/group seems to be hidden from non-members:

At the time I was active it was a fairly tight-knit group of about 35-40 members. Met lots of cool folks from around the world heavily into vinyl, tape trading, zines, etc. I remember posting at other clubs too, but that's the only link I know offhand. Sometime in the late 90's/early 2000's I started posting at the old FMP message board. Then, I think when the forum shut down temporarily, one of the regulars there created his own board called "Allied Metal Legions" (AML) where I posted under the name Tombcrusher for a while (plus a couple troll accounts). Lots of hilarious shit at both FMP and AML during those days. Some of the regulars post on the NWN board now.